Queeeestion- for those non-US folks, how is WFH in your areas? Is the rto push as big as it is here? Is wfh /flex culture established, or seen as a temp thing?

Its got to start somewhere, we have to agree on something, or its going to get a lot hotter in a lot of horrific ways. I hate the hair splitting, the “yes, but what abouts”- things are getting bad out there and it has to stop. There are 190 other countries that are putting up with this, isn’t that enough to enforce something??

A velocipede, of sorts!

Yep- starts out like guyver, but the main character can’t properly transition so he needs a robot buddy as assistant (and cannon platform)

Holy hell, that hole could fit two Manhattans.

Not to be pedantic, but the original use of the word intelligence in this context was “gathered digested information.”

Unfortunately, during the VC funding rounds for this, “intelligence” became the “thinky meat brain” type, and a marketing term associated with personhood, and the intense personalization along with it.

Not to be pedantic, but the original use of the word intelligence in this context was “gathered digested information.”

Unfortunately, during the VC funding rounds for this, “intelligence” became the “thinky meat brain” type, and a marketing term associated with personhood, and the intense personalization along with it.

This is super funny, but why is the signature cropped out?

Thank you for this wonderful writeup, and sharing your knowledge in this area. A large barrier for people trying to learn about this stuff is that it was so verboten to mention for so many years, that there are effectively no introductory texts on the topic. (There are a ton of videos, but a ten-minute clipshow referencing a book someone liked isn’t as comprehensive as a well resourced popsci book.)

Did any survive? Are there known lost works?

I don’t know who you are, but I love you- spread the good word that “there is no war, only Robot Jox”…

There always was at least a small contingent of people with this kind of discourse, but as a creeky old timer, i started seeing the change around 2014-2015, when everything seemed to scale up.

I feel a lot of it came from consolidation. In the before times, forums were small, topic-focused, usually separate websites, and the mods either owned the site, or could directly speak to the owner.(its own separate drama, but you could always hop onto another site.

You always had poop throwers and trolls, but each of the poop throwers usually had a specific type or trigger that would set off. The trolls were usually of the kenM variety, where they stirred poop and it was contained to a degree.

I think most importantly, because people were going to a place for a specific topic, it kept people somewhat civil. People with different tastes and opinions came together under a shared interest, and it helped with dialogue.

There were a LOT of downsides. One which doesn’t get addressed enough was that people weren’t as accepting of others being publicly identifiable as LGBTQ+, disabilities or being on the spectrum (those forum sections was often soft- coded as “anime”). And those biases were often baked into these groups. But honestly, today, it seems like the internet is even more segregated than before. While now, everyone is more or less forced onto one of the big socials, they no longer go to “the car forum” or “the tabletop forum”, its the “car forum of a rigid narrow band of political partisan and identity that you have to prove allegiance to or you cannot talk about sparkplugs”.

While I’m happy a lot of folks with differing paths in life can find community online, I wish there were more spaces for cross pollination of those beliefs. And because all these differing threads are under the control of sterile, monoculture corporations with little connection to these forums, admin policy reflects a detached, nuanced free reality where all furrys are porn, POC content is regulated into POC only threads, and grandma’s automatically get shoved in with the alt-right. (I’m in no way calling grannies alt-right, but a LOT of recommendation sites will try to channel them into innocuous looking alt treads, so please protect and inform your grannies)

For now, I’m enjoying Lemmy, but it feels like a distillation of all the issues mentioned. Not only is everything hyper granular , but you can essentially filter everything you don’t like off the island. While that may give a sort of peace of mind, it doesn’t address the issue that theres a bunch of jerks here, or expose those jerks to anti-jerk ways, so lemmy is becoming an even more amplified echo chamber than reddit, but now a user doesn’t even have to know that there’s a mirror-verse of the same threads saying the same things, only filtered through ingroup opinions.

Everyone’s railing against “the snacks” bit, but no one is talking about the “we do not keep anything like this at home”

Dem property taxes!

Please, do not insult crabs. The correct phase is “jerks”.

Does anyone have any good tech- related forums on Lemmy? I’m still digging around as i find a lot of interesting but “Quiet” ones.

There is a nice exhibition on the Moomans at the Brooklyn Library right now, if anyone is interested! https://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/celebrate-tove-jansson’s-central-library-dweck-20250809-0100pm

Thank you!!

Thats amazing! Do you have any sources or papers on this temple? (I would love to share with my teacher friends!)

Plug in your phone, you’re at 1%’!